The Maggot People by Henning Koch Page B

your mother like that?”
    â€œOh God, you really are a peasant; you even respect mothers. They’re just women who got knocked up.”
    â€œWhere do you come into it?”
    â€œI told you. Maggot folk need to fuck real people, or they die. They try to keep it low key, sort of like normal humans going to the toilet.” She trembled with revulsion. “Anyway, back to Ricardo. One day he just walked into my bedroom with his tree-trunk legs. I was eighteen years old. His testicles were so full of maggots they looked like drum skins.” She laughed uneasily, but her eyes clouded over. “It was kind of a fantasy of mine that he would come into my room, see me on the bed… and then nature would take its course. Except I hadn’t thought about what it would really be like having an ugly shit like that pumping away at my ovaries. So you see,” she sighed resignedly, “my whole family was transformed into maggot folk, all in the aid of Ricardo getting his rocks off. Eventually their doctor sent them off to a hospital… where they were incinerated… for the benefit of the human race.”
    â€œChrist, it’s barbaric,” said Michael.
    â€œThe only good part,” she said, “is that maggots get old, too. They quieten down, eat their beans, and shut up.”
    She was interrupted by the sound of a creaking door.
    Purissima came barefooted across the grass, a secretive smile on her face as if pleased to have these two visitants lying like pods between her flowering roses. She dipped her hands in rose oil. “Off with your nightshirts,” she chimed. “Time for massage, then aloe berries.”
    â€œI hate aloe berries,” said Ariel.
    â€œSo do maggots; aloe makes them less randy and rather docile,” said Purissima. “Remember, you are passengers…”

13 .
    Venus passed overhead and faded with morning. When Michael woke, Ariel had also faded. He spent the morning digging a trench for her in a walled cemetery at the bottom of the garden, whilst Purissima’s wailing from the house occasionally wafted down to him. He listened to the sound his spade made, and the soil piling up. By the time he’d finished, Purissima had anointed the body and placed it in a small casket.
    When he saw Michael’s devastation, Günter licked his nostrils clean and said, “You know you mustn’t take cessation of life so seriously. It’s only emotion, and emotion passes. Plus, when you think about it, nothing actually exists anyway. Everything… absolutely everything… is just one big illusion. A crock of shit, you might say.”
    â€œOnly a moment ago she was right here. Now she’s gone.”
    â€œShe was never here in the first place,” said Günter. “And neither are you.”
    When Michael stroked her cheek, he sensed an enormously distant response: a faint rustling of wind through the leaves of a forest. But he knew that Ariel was now in that world he had experienced once, the gray flickering world of the dead television screen.
    â€œLet her go,” said Günter. “She’s happier there than she ever was here.”
    Before they lowered her into the earth, Purissima screwed an air intake into a purpose-made duct in the coffin. They scooped back the soil and stood there looking at the grave. The small metal chimney was equipped with a tiny fan, turning in the wind. He let his eyes sweep across the little cemetery, and he realized there was a slightly discordant feeling about the graves around him: they all had the same metal pipes poking out of the ground, and the same glittering, spinning air intakes.
    Günter cleared his throat. “Where will you go now?”
    â€œDoes it matter?”
    â€œSome would say it does matter. You must go to Cannes, you must find a woman called Janine. Can you memorize an address?” He gave him a house number and a street name.
    After Purissima had